This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.
This feature article introduces our recent work on understanding the roles played by citrate and poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP) as capping agents in seed-mediated syntheses of Ag nanocrystals with controlled shapes. We have demonstrated that citrate and PVP selectively bind to Ag(111) and Ag(100) surfaces, respectively, and thus favor the formation of Ag nanocrystals enclosed preferentially by {111} or {100} facets. In addition, we have quantified the coverage density of PVP adsorbed on the surface of Ag nanocubes. On the basis of the mechanistic understanding, a series of Ag nanocrystals with controlled shapes and sizes have been successfully synthesized by using different combinations of seeds and capping agents: single-crystal spherical/cubic seeds with citrate for cuboctahedrons and octahedrons or with PVP for cubes and bars and plate-like seeds with citrate for enlarged thin plates or with PVP for thickened plates.